Busy busy busy... I continue to maintain that visitors are tiring, but they're nice in terms of Eytan-visiting-time and also for inspiring outings. Mike's mom and stepdad were here, and we managed a couple of wineries and a trip to the local botanical gardens.
And my mom was back for a couple of days as well -- so you get some compare contrast photos of how big Eytan has gotten over the past few weeks (9lbs 9oz!).
Relatively, though, he's still pretty little...
Musings
I expected Eytan to be a little bit of a tricky name around here -- thus spelling it Eytan instead of Eitan in the interest of phonetics. I think that's helped in avoiding the Aye-tan (like aye aye, captain) tendency, but we are getting a lot of Eaton and Anton. It's interesting because, while I know Eytan is a little unfamiliar, it's not really such a hard name -- but turns out familiarity and difficulty are quite different. I've realized recently that while I've lived many places where Jewish names weren't always familiar, I've probably never lived in places before where even the concept of "foreign" sounding names was, well, foreign. In my experiences, teachers might trip over Aninda or Yi on the first day of school, but names from other languages were not necessarily uncommon. Here, unless the names are Anglo-y or Latino (or even hippie or biblical), they are.
Outings
Meanwhile, Eytan has done a bit of exploring the last few weeks -- helped along by an infant stroller base, a cooling off of the weather, and weight gain that makes him big enough for many different kinds of carriers. He has gone peach picking and wine grape stomping,
he has accompanied the baby goats when they were getting their hooves trimmed and all the goats when they first got to explore their new pen under the willow,
and perhaps most exciting of all, he and
Ernie the goat and mike's mom and I all went to the Cashmere
elementary school one morning so that all the kindergarteners could pet a goat and
reinforce learning the letter G.
Day-to-day
Meanwhile, Eytan's other pursuits include sleeping,
getting his diaper changed,
yelling,
smiling (in this case while hiking),
hanging out,
surfing,
hiccuping (sorry, no pictures here), and occasionally dressing up like a disembodied hand.
From my perspective, this whole Eytan the baby thing seems pretty disconnected from the previous pregnancy episode. I know that, ideally, one usually follows the other, but somehow they feel kind of unrelated. Odd.
Gaspar
In non-baby news, we are wrapping up the season here. Our garden harvest has been manageable, mostly because we let the weeds and imperfect irrigation scheme crowd out half our plants and so grew a reasonable amount of food this year. Our strawberries did really well, though, as did some dahlias.
We have wood now for our stove for the winter.
And our attempts to downsize the goat herd have been, well, a very little bit successful. We almost had takers for Ed and for Ernie and Bert, but those all fell through. We did, however, have a young boy adopt Gaspar as his birthday present, to raise and show at next year's county fair. A little sad, and not really the goat that was going to cut down on our hay usage by going to live elsewhere, but probably a step in the right direction. Bye Gaspar! We'll have to go see him at the fair next year.
